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THE BUDDHIST MEDITATIVE ASKESIS One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. . . . No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite
disregarded.1 Anthropology, the discipline I represent, has dealt extensively with alien "modes of thought" and has made detailed sociological analyses of such states as spirit possession and shamanic trances, but rarely as vehicles for thought or as modes of thinking. James believed that the pathologies that mystics suffer from did not disqualify their religious experience; yet, some studies have implicitly and/or explicitly tended to pathologize mystical and visionary states, and this is also true of their popular characterizations through such labels as "altered states of consciousness" or "out-of-body experiences." And though there are multiple forms of trance in the crosscultural record, every society outside of the post-Enlightenment West held that, outside of spirit attack, forms of trance were desirable experiences, though difficult to achieve. It was almost everywhere believed that, while spurious trances did occur, genuine trances provided access to knowledge that is outside our normal cognitive faculties during the waking consciousness. I want to present here a sympathetic phenomenological understanding of Buddhist meditative trance as a mode of thought that has virtually gone out of vogue in the post-Enlightenment West but, nevertheless, continues to exist in many contemporary societies and in parts of both Europe and the rest of the world as one of the most powerful ways of generating "true" knowledge as, once again, William James also clearly recognized.2 However, it was not through William James that I came to understand trance initially, but from my study of the Buddha's own Enlightenment, the process whereby he achieved the soteriological goal of nirvana while yet living in the world. The term Buddha means one who is "enlightened." And the derivative term "Enlightenment" refers nowadays, in both popular and Indological discourse, to the Buddha's spiritual experience as he lay seated under the bodhi tree, the tree of enlightenment, in deep meditation. Though the term Enlightenment has come to mean the Buddha's own transformative spiritual askesis, there are some who still prefer the terms "awakened" and "awakening"—which to me is the better translation of the Pali word bodhi, from which the word Buddha is derived. My guess was that late-nineteenth-century translators thought of Theravada Buddhism not only as the original pristine Buddhism but also as one that was consonant with the spirit of modernity and science, namely, rationality or Reason. If bodhi means "awakening," one might ask: from what state did the Buddha awaken? To anticipate my later argument, he awoke from a physical and spiritual death into a new life very much in the way of an initiation ritual, imitating in his own inimitable way the lives of other heroes of myth. In order to understand this view of the Buddha's spiritual experience, one must take the Buddhist mythos seriously rather than relegate it to secondary importance, which is the strategy of many Indologists as well as that of contemporary intellectuals in Buddhist nations.
European scholarship, influenced by its own Enlightenment, has tried to construct the historical Buddha from the mass of mythic material surrounding his life, dispensation, and death. While this is an admirable, though somewhat hopeless, intellectual exercise, the Buddha is nothing if he is not a figure of the imagination for Buddhists through the many centuries. The life of the imagined Buddha is not all that different from other mythic figures who, in the popular consciousness, lived and walked in the world. Thus, the Buddha was conceived in a miraculous manner when his mother Maya was observing the precept on sexual abstinence. She could see him as a crystal in her womb; he emerged unsullied by blood, mucus, and other birth impurities; as he was born he took seven steps and then rose in the air and surveyed the eight quarters of the world, which is the locus of his universal and transcendental teaching. His mother Maya (significantly meaning "Illusion") died when he was seven days old because, as some texts put it, it was inconceivable for the pure womb of the Buddha's mother to be sullied by sexual and childbirth impurity. The Buddha's mother's sister brought him up: she is Mahaprajapati Gotami, named after the Creator of Hindu mythology because she was the creator of Gotama (Sanskrit, Gautama), the Buddha. The name of the father also takes on mythic significance: he is Suddhodana, "pure seed," where seed can also mean semen. When the Buddha was born, sages predicted that he would either be a world-conquering monarch or a world-renouncing Buddha. Both are models of heroes, or great men (mahapurusa), but of radically different orientations: one totally involved in the world of wealth and power, and the other totally removed from it. They possess thirty-two marks, the details of which are spelled out in Buddhist texts.3 Modern scholars who tell us that the Bodhisattva's father was a minor chief or raja are not only missing the point; they are guilty of extrapolating an empirical reality from a mythic or symbolic set of events. For all we know, the empirical Buddha might not have had a father at all; or more likely, he had plain ordinary parents like yours or mine. The real Buddha of the Buddhist imagination was born apposite to a world conqueror: the texts make this clear by the mythicization of his father, who is presented as a great king, living in wealth, splendor, and power. The father also wanted the Bodhisattva to be a world conqueror, as befits his heritage, and kept him confined to the walls of the palace. What kept the Buddha within the palace are the seductions of hedonism. The mansion of the prince has everything to satisfy the senses: women, music and dancing, luxury. Given this context, the birth of the Buddha makes sense: he is cast in the heroic mold of the world conqueror, the conqueror over the very things that embodied his other and more profound birthright—that of Buddhahood. The confrontation of the two ideal models—royalty and renunciation—occurs in the famous myth of the four signs. The great Buddhist scholar Asvaghosa says that the four signs were created by the gods; and the popular Jataka Nidana says that the deities thought thus: "Prince Siddhartha's time for Enlightenment is drawing near; let us show him the Omens [signs]."4 As I read this myth, the prince was a prisoner of hedonism literally prevented from knowing the outside world by his well-intentioned father. One day the prince goes for a drive into the city with his charioteer, Channa. There he meets with the spectacle of a feeble old man, a sight that he has never seen before. In other visits to the city he sees the spectacle of sickness, then of death, and then the transcendence of all of these in the serene calm of the yellow-robed renouncer. The hero is confronted with the skull beneath the skin, the true nature of the world from which he had been insulated, the world of transience and decay; and he is also presented with a model for overcoming them all in the sign of the renouncer. Note the setting: the hero goes in his chariot in splendor into the city; what confronts him there is the very opposite of that which exists within the walls of the palace. When he comes back from his last trip to the city, after witnessing the sign of the homeless renouncer, he is told that a son is born to him, reminding him that he is trapped in a life of domesticity, that of the home. The child is named Rahula, the "fetter," the chain that binds the Bodhisattva to the world. He decides to break this fetter and, silently bidding his wife and son farewell, he prepares to leave the palace.5 Satiated with hedonism and indifferent to political power, the Bodhisattva leaves his palace accompanied by Channa, his charioteer, and his horse Kanthaka, portrayed in heroic dimensions in the Buddhist imagination. The horse reaches the river Anoma, which it clears at one bound, landing on the other shore. There, the Bodhisattva cuts his hair and beard, sheds his royal clothes, and then dons the mendicant garb. Crossing the river in this and in similar cases is also a symbolic act: a movement from one form of life to another, from the world of the world conqueror to that of the world renouncer. The cutting off of worldly ties is complete: but he has still not achieved his goal of Buddhahood. The Bodhisattva is still not a Buddha; he remains a liminal persona.6 He has given up his royal status, but he has not yet accomplished his aim. Like neophytes in initiation rites and like other heroes of myth, the Bodhisattva has many obstacles to overcome before he reaches his goal. These are not physical obstacles, however, but ones that are moral and spiritual.
After he renounces the world the Bodhisattva seeks the help of gurus, as is customary in the Indic traditions. Following such advice, he courts forms of extreme physical penance and deprivation, also common at the time, for six years. The pain, endurance, and suffering of the Bodhisattva is described in the first person in several texts, and his physical emaciation is vividly represented in memorable Buddhist sculptures. The Buddha himself says that at this time he lived on virtually nothing,
"unclothed, flouting life's decencies, licking my hands (after meals). . . ."7 He then describes the types of taboos pertaining to the acceptance of alms that perhaps was common practice among ascetic sects of the time, but totally against the highly decorous practices initiated by the Buddha after the monk order got
established.8 And the effect of these practices? "Because I ate so little, all my limbs became like the knotted joints of withered creepers; because I ate so little, my buttocks became like a
bullock's hoof; because I ate so little my protruding backbone became like a string of balls; because I ate so little my gaunt ribs became like the crazy rafters of a tumble-down shed; because I ate so little, the pupils of my eyes appeared lying low and deep in their sockets as sparkles of water in a deep well appear lying low and deep; because I ate so little, my scalp became shrivelled and shrunk as a bitter white gourd cut before it is ripe becomes shrivelled and shrunk by a hot
wind."9
Suddhodana knows, however, that his son cannot die without fulfilling his mission; and so does the anthropologist, because neophytes in initiation rites do not die, either. On another level one can say that the Bodhisattva is now the prisoner of asceticism! In practicing asceticism, the Bodhisattva has moved from the indulgence of sensual pleasures to its very opposite—the mortification of the body. He must also overcome this obstacle to achieve the
"middle path." The Buddha now moves from the banyan tree to the bodhi tree (Ficus religiosa) nearby, the tree under which he would achieve an "awakening." Facing the East, again symbolizing a rising, he decides not to move until he has found out the truth of existence. The next great mythic episode occurs when the Buddha, meditating under the bodhi tree, is assailed by Mara, Death himself (who is also Eros of the Buddhist imagination), waging war against the Buddha. This episode is described in graphic detail in the popular traditions and I shall not deal with it here except to say that Mara attacked the Buddha with multiple weapons, but the sage remained untouched, such being the power of the perfections (paramita), the moral heroisms practiced in past births. In the first watch of the night he enters into the four states of meditative trance leading to complete equanimity, which permits him to recollect in all details his former existences, hundreds and thousands and hundred thousands of them. In that continuing spirit, during the second watch, the Buddha sees, with his newly acquired "divine vision," the long panorama of the passing and rising of human beings through the operation of the universal action of karma and rebirth. And in the last watch, which must surely be close to dawn and to a literal awakening, he discovers the nature of error and the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism and, according to some accounts, the critical theory of causality known as paticcasamuppada, or "dependant origination." After this first awakening, when he becomes Buddha, or the "Awakened One," he spends another seven weeks in meditation and meets with further spiritual adventures. After the seven weeks are over, the hero is reborn again, or, in Buddhist terminology, he is the "Fully Awakened One" (samma sambuddha), a term which European scholars influenced by their own Enlightenment thinkers have generously sanctified as "the enlightenment." The double entendre of "awakened" is, I think, very significant: first, the Buddha has passed the liminal stage and emerged into a new life-form and the founding of a new order; second, his is a spiritual awakening, a discovery of a way of salvific knowledge. Modern Buddhist intellectuals see Buddhism as a "rational" religion on the Enlightenment model. Yet, for me, the Buddhist ratio is radically different from both the Greek and the European Enlightenments. The Buddha discovered the truth of existence through his meditative trance; or, to express it differently, truth was intuitively discerned. Other Buddhas had discovered the same truths before; and when the knowledge of the doctrine will have faded, yet other Buddhas will arise who will rediscover it. The Platonic type of reason, or the later European Enlightenment rationality, has second place in Buddhism: the Buddhist ratio consists of the elaboration and discursive exposition of the intuitively discovered truths. Yet, like its European and Greek parallels, Buddhism's ratio is full of abstract terms to describe the nature of the world and the release from it, even though, at least in the Buddhist dialogues, or suttas, they are embodied in a specific type of narrative framework (which is also true of their Platonic counterparts). Finally, relegation of the Buddhist ratio to secondary importance is once again apparent in its soteriological stance: as in the case of the Buddha's own awakening, forms of discursive and rational thinking must be abandoned at a certain stage in the quest for salvation. I think one can even say that the Buddha's experience under the bodhi tree is the mysterium tremendum of Buddhism. I shall now present perhaps the more controversial part of my argument, namely, what I think is meant by the Buddha giving primacy to knowledge acquired through concentration that requires the abandonment and the emptying of the mind of discursive knowledge and its re-adoption after the experience is over. In my view a special kind of thought operates in his meditative askesis: the agency involved is not the "I" of the discursively reasoning and active consciousness; rather, it is the "it," if one wants to use the Nietzschean term (not to be confused with the Freudian "id," even though Freud was influenced by Nietzsche, at least indirectly). Nietzsche says: "A thought comes when 'it' wishes and not when 'I' wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject 'I' is the condition of the predicate 'think.' It thinks: but that this 'it' is precisely the famous old 'ego' is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an immediate certainty."12 For Nietzsche, even "it thinking" is tainted with agency, compelling one to think "according to grammatical habit."13 It seems that Nietzsche is highlighting a form of thinking, seemingly without agency, and for purposes of convenience I will borrow his trope and call it "it thinking."14 I do not, however, believe "it thinking" is the only way of knowing or that it is preferable to "I thinking," except that it is one way of thinking, a way that has virtually gone out of vogue in Europe with the Cartesian "I think, I am." The Buddha's spiritual experience entails the furthermost development of the kind of "thinking" that Freud formulated in the dream work. One must therefore go back to the dream book to reconsider Freud's insights about "it thinking." Strictly speaking, one cannot say, "I had a dream"; most people would say, as Sri Lankans do, "I saw a dream."15 Freud emphasized the visuality of the dream in several memorable phrases. Thus, dreams are "thoughts transformed into images."16 "A dream thought is unusable so long as it is expressed in an abstract form"; it has to be "transformed into pictorial language."17 Aside from its visuality, the dream simply appears before one's dimmed and diminished consciousness. Even the dark "dream thoughts" that precipitated the manifest dream merely rise to the surface with the near-suspension of the active consciousness during sleep. Nevertheless, Freud did mention in several places that while the dream is "egotistical" in character, this is not all there is to it. In dreams "we appear not to think but to experience; that is to say, we attach complete belief to the hallucinations."18 These hallucinatory features of dreams appear when "some kind of 'authoritative' activity of the self has ceased."19 In other words, Freud is asserting, I believe, that though dreams are "completely egotistical," the "I" appears as a picture or is externalized into images that float before us in our state of sleep.20 Hence, in a dream the mind functions like a "compound microscope or a photographic apparatus."21 The "I" does not think and cannot think in the dream; the undefined "dream ego" in Freud is not the ego of the waking consciousness.22 In dreams, the "everyday, sober method of expression is replaced by a pictorial one."23
The Buddhist meditative askesis is a further development of "it thinking," and no wonder the Buddha says that one must suspend discursive thought ("I thinking") as a prerequisite to achieving the former, and this in turn entails overcoming the false notion of "I," according to Buddhism. The crux of meditation is to develop "it thinking," both in its visual and imagistic forms and what I might tentatively call its free-associational forms such that even philosophical ideas ("truths") appear in the field of the thinker's vision or unconsciousness without the mediation of egoistic discursive thinking. James makes a similar point in relation to the "neotic quality" of mystical knowledge: "[M]ystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time."24 Does this mean that the Buddha has become an enlightened thinker in the European mode after his awakening? The Buddha's spiritual awakening is never left behind; it constitutes the basis for forms of askeses which negate the view of the Buddha as a rationalist in the Enlightenment sense. Thus, alongside texts that seem to give a premium to conceptual rationality, there are others which seem to put the Buddha into a class with diviners, shamans, and spirit mediums. In the Mahapadana Sutta monks are engaged in discussions about peoples' previous lives and the Buddha, overhearing this conversation, mentions that he can, through meditative concentration, remember the lives of past Buddhas; and furthermore, "gods also revealed these matters to him, enabling him to remember [all those things]." On other occasions the Buddha talks of his capacity to get into trance states and he performs actions reminiscent of shamanic virtuosity. When this experience is over the Buddha can switch back to normal life and to discursive "I thinking"—and so back and forth from "it thinking" to "I thinking" without ever committing the Cartesian folly of "I think, I am." Thus, once the mysterium tremendum of the Buddha's experience under the bodhi tree has become normalized, "it thinking" begins to exist in a positive dialectical relationship with "I thinking." Let me now qualify my argument that both the Greek and the European Enlightenments were hostile to the idea of "it thinking" in their different ways. Such forms of thinking cannot be eradicated entirely; they persist in the dream work and in psychosis. This makes for their being tapped by such modern movements as surrealism and for their appearance in the unusual introspection of Nietzschean thinkers like Georges Bataille and many other modern and postmodern thinkers, whose work has been discussed at length by Louis Sass in Madness and Modernism.26 Yet I think there is a problem here: Nietzsche and many modern and postmodern thinkers are critical of the Enlightenment project with its iron cage of rationality. Yet, can one living in the modern world escape from rationality's bondage, or, to put it in early Nietzschean language borrowed from Schopenhauer, can one pierce "the veil of maya"?27 For Nietzsche, the Dionysian in his ecstatic "entrancement" or "intoxication" can do it because his work is "an annihilation of the usual borders and limits of existence." "Something supernatural sounds forth from him: he feels himself a god, now he himself strides forth as enraptured and uplifted as he saw the gods stride forth in dreams. . . . Man is no longer the artist, he has become the work of art . . . [produced] in the shudder of intoxication." It is one thing to sketch a lost past, as Nietzsche does in The Birth of Tragedy, or to imagine a powerful figure like Zarathustra as the model prophet of the future. However, it is another thing to become Zarathustra, to incorporate him into one's own being; and it is even more difficult to be able to create such things as visions and ecstatic trances in the field of modernity, even for those who have intellectually rejected Enlightenment rationality and the primacy of the ego. Even those poststructuralist thinkers who protest against the rationality of the Enlightenment end up as prisoners of rationality. Foucault is the prime example of an anti-rationalist rationalist who tried to pierce the veil of maya in his own personal life—through sexuality, through the ingestion of hallucinatory drugs, through the visceral life of San Francisco's gay bars. Even the picture-thinking of surreal painters is close to the visuality of hysterical patients and the pictorial thinking of dreams. Only a very few can remain modern or postmodern Europeans and achieve a mode of being or non-being associated with visionary trance and yet remain sane. Hence the importance of modern thinkers like Edwin Muir, literary critic, translator of Kafka, poet and mystic, who can reject rationality even while living and acting in a rational world and who unabashedly accept visionary trance as "a revelation of truth."28 Or, as the Buddhists formulated it, one can accept rationality in the nominal or conventional sense and reject it on the deep intuitive level. It is not surprising that Muir was born and raised in the remote Orkney Islands off Scotland in a deeply religious, Protestant community. As an adult he was converted into a Nietzschean worldview; and he had Nietzschean dream-visions. But soon, especially after severe mental "dejection," he went into Jungian psychoanalysis and then experienced dreams, visions, and trances that "began to come in crowds." These visionary experiences were expectably in the Jungian style, which was not hostile to what Muir called "mythological dreams," and, for Muir but not for his Jungian analyst, provided intimations, if not proof, of immortality. At the same time he could continue to play both Nietzschean and Jungian language games when, for example, he says about a dream-vision that "it was not 'I' who dreamt it, but something else which the psychologists call the racial unconscious, and for which there are other names."29 No wonder Muir felt obsessed with time and imagined he was two hundred and fifty years old, and that, spiritually speaking, he was born before the industrial revolution.30 And in the spirit of this paper, Muir could clearly indicate the bases for his and others' visionary experiences: "No autobiography can confine itself to conscious life, and that sleep, in which we pass a third of our existence, is a mode of experience, and our dreams a part of reality."31 Like Muir's, the Buddhist meditative askesis can coexist with rationality, though not in the same space-time. It is this rapprochement with rationality that makes Buddhist meditation appealing to many modern intellectuals of the Apollonian type.
Now let me look at Buddhist theory and practice once again in relation to the problems posed above. The Buddha never defined "nirvana" as such, and when he was asked about nirvana the sage remained "silent." This silence of the Buddha is generally understood in European scholarship and by Buddhist intellectuals as a recognition of the impossibility to "speak" of the soteriological experience, the idea that the "vision baffles telling," as Plotinus put it and also in the spirit of Christian negative theology influenced by Neoplatonism. I think this is correct; nevertheless, through his silence the Buddha is invisibly pointing to something else, namely, the silence of meditative askesis as the path to salvation. Silence, a symbolic language if ever there was one, is not a Dionysian but an Apollonian condition. It produces trance-like states generated through "contemplation," a very Apollonian enterprise, rather than through excess. Multiple modes of Dionysian excess were a feature of the Indian landscape in the Buddha's time as they are now, the most common form being spirit possession, divine or demonic. Whether such states necessarily brought about the transfiguration of a person is open to question, and Nietzsche's blanket statements about Dionysianism ought to be seen as that great thinker's imagination of a past world and a future to be built on it, rather than as an experienced reality. Yet, taking Nietzsche's idealized Dionysianism at its face value might give us some insights into both Buddhism and Nietzschean thought. Both deny the reality of the ego, but they approach their radical deconstruction of the ego from different perspectives and philosophical positions. The Buddhist position emerges from an argument with Upanishadic Hinduism and from its own experience with meditation. Nietzsche's comes from his rejection of the Cartesian ego and Enlightenment rationality (though in Thus Spoke Zarathustra he does use the words "soul" and "ego" as another way of speaking about the body).32 Both eschew an important assumption made by diverse Western thinkers who would claim that the limits of language are the limits of thought. Both have conceptions of an authentic mode of existence, but built on differing premises. "It thinking" for the Buddhist meditator is a practical possibility; but for Nietzsche and those who follow him this is a much more complicated task, if not an impossible one, as far as one's own life is concerned. Buddhist meditative askesis itself is a response to the "noise" and the excess of spirit possession and its violent, perhaps even orgiastic, trance-induced bodily movements. Possession trance existed prior to the "contemplative trance" which Buddhism developed through meditative silence. In the Nietzschean language game that I have appropriated, one can say that both forms of ecstasy can yield knowledge outside of the discerning ego, and that means through "it thinking." But it is hard to believe that Nietzsche could possibly have sympathized with the Apollonian silence of Buddhism; and it is equally hard for Buddhism to have accepted into its spiritual disciplines any form of noisy Dionysian excess. For Buddhists, there is no way of piercing the veil of maya except through meditative disciplines. Even trances such as Muir's are imperfect approaches to the soteriological goal of Buddhism, though in his diaries Muir comes perilously close to a Buddhist vision of the world (or for that matter the medieval Christian vision) in what he calls a "waking dream" or "walking trance." Yet, one might ask, how is it possible to avoid playing with death if one is interested in immortality? For many religious virtuosos, the salvation quest, irrespective of whether or not it is expressed in a mode of meditation, must surely mean "practicing death," as such diverse thinkers as Socrates and the Buddha seemed to have realized.34
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Copyright 2008 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. |